The Quality score column was launched by Google, the column gives you an approximate idea of the keywords you use. Great, ok, poor are the status given for each keyword. Login your Adcenter account, enter into your campaign and then into an adgroup. Select your keyword tab and click customize columns. The Quality score column will display the details.

Great - higher relevance and minimum bid is required,Ok - not upto the level and moderate bid is required and poor - totally irrelevant and the keyword can be removed instead of high bidding. Know more about Quality Score.

Quality Score column seem to be very much helpful for the advertisers targeting limited number of keywords.

Mark

Tags : Quality Score, Google Adcenter, Quality Score ratings 

Quality sore of a keyword mainly depends on the key term relavance. How much is your ad relevant to the keyword which is entered as a serch term is more important. In Adwords help center I came accross a question “What is a Quality score and how is it calculated?” from which the main factors influencing Quality score are

Performance variables like keyword clickthrough rate (CTR), ad text relevance, overall historical keyword performance with Google, and even the user experience on the landing page or site associated with an ad. We put all of these factors and more together to create a Quality Score

And the formula used for the calculation of Quality score was also given.

Quality Score = (keyword’s CTR, ad text relevance, keyword relevance, landing page relevance)*

*Where the interactions between the Quality Score variables change as we continue to refine how to measure and define quality in AdWords.

These factors according to Google affects your Quality score. The quality score is likely to be changed everytime when the relavance factors are affected. Know how your Quality score is used. Eventhough the formula changes often these factors will always have a impact in your Google rankings.
Mark

Tags : Quality Score, Google Adwords, Quality score calculation, Keyword relevance

Google in their official blog has announced about badware notifications. Google already notifies the user by showing warnings on surfing badware sites and Google has planned a better way for badware notifications. Google’s work with stopbadware.org and integration of malware notifications in webmaster tools were the preliminary steps taken. Now steps have been taken to alert webmasters.

Along with informing webmasters about their sites and further steps to be taken, Google has planned to give some examples of badware sites which will be more helpful to diagonize their sites. An example in the webmastercentral blog was

A common occurrence with compromised sites is the insertion of a 1-pixel iframe causing the automatic download of badware from another site.

The next is to notify through Emails. When Google flags a site as a badware the webmaster of the site will be intimated. As Google was not able to determine the perfect email addresses, the email will be sent to webmasters@domain or admin@domain and etc.

In future webmasters may provide their preffered email-id’s. So these notifications from Google for webmasters will be more helpful for handling badware sites.

Mark

Tags : Google, Webmasters, Badware notification, Webmaster tool

Yahoo search blog has announced that many shortcuts are launched in Yahoo as it is an Oscar season. So to entertain people and to know more about the searched movie, Yahoo provides trailers along with the search results.

Yahoo has also made many shortcuts nowadays in Yahoo Search. The show times of the film can be easily known by entering your postal code. Entering the country code such as ca for Canada can give you some effective results. If you search film name in google.ca it asks for a postal code and entering it will give you the moving timings. The same can also be done in Google,Ask and live.com. The film name with zip code gives you film timings.

To search about famous hotels you have to type the city name and then append hotels with it. For eg: Chennai hotels. Similarly to know about flight rates type flight rates city to city. Enter the name instead of city. These information from Yahoo makes search more easier and effective.

Mark

Tags: Yahoo,Yahoo Search, Search shortcuts, Movie shortcuts

Willam Slawski of SEO by the Sea, has made a post on a Google patent filed in Augest 22, 2005 named Removing documents.

When a search is made the user is provided with a list of web pages. The user might feel certain web pages are undesirable because web page is spam, the web page content is unrelated to the user’s interest, the web page content is offensive, or for other reasons. The patent Removing documents basically describes how the user can remove those pages or sites from web searches.

For more details about the patent refer here.

Aravindhan

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?, What are the benefits of SEO? and How to do SEO? are some of the common questions of any novice doing SEO. Shari Thurow puts it nicely in a nutshell.

to get the greatest impact from organic SEO, optimizers should have a basic understanding of how search engines work. Part of this understanding is to monitor how SERP design evolves to improve the searcher experience. By optimizing a Web site for people who search, everybody wins: searchers, search engines, SEOs, and Web site owners

Read Term Highlighting and Search Engine Optimization for more information.

DSarathy.

SEO Tags: Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Search Engine Land

When Google bot crawls your site, your site should not be down if not Google bot might think that all your pages are removed and no such site exists. When I went through a thread in Google groups, the query from bigmamaslings was

I’ve been having problems with downtime from my hosting company (am moving tomorrow as this is the final straw) and I’ve now practically disappeated from Google. I was in 3rd position for 5 of the more popular searches for my business and now - nothing.

and VanessaFox from google has replied that

If the host is down when Googlebot tries to access your pages, then those pages may disappear from the index until Googlebot can crawl them again. In webmaster tools, do the pages you want indexed appear in the crawl errors section? If so, then Googlebot was unable to access them.
If you are moving the site to a new host and the pages are available the next time Googlebot tries to access them, then you should see them in the index again soon after that.

So down time can make differences in your business. Always be aware.

Mark

Tags : Google, Down time, Google Bot, Crawler

Yesterday I came accross a visual internet search engine which was more than a month old. The name Pagebull seems to be odd but the way of presentation is something different.

Pagebull - the visual internet search engine provides screenshots of pages instead of text based results. It has also highlighted the search term in the screen shots. The search can also be based on countries. You can change the size by changing the display method(3×4,2×6,4×3). As the major part of it is images large monitor and broadband gives you a better user experience.

In the bottom left corner of the screenshot, icons are provided to furnish the text details and to zoom the screenshots. If you are more concerned with the text content of the search results Pagebull is odd to use but visual based searches will be more easier.

Mark

Tags : Pagebull, Search Engine ,Visual search, Thumbnail view

In my previous blog Rank better with RSS feed , to make many know about your blogs, use your RSS feed effectively. Tips on using feeds which was the topic in Google’s official blog yesterday.

The feeds can be used to know the count of your subscribers, this is possible by using Feedburner feeds. Feedfetcher from Google crawls your data, so the same information can be taken from the crawling data of google from your logs. A unique feed id is given so that the confusions due to multiple URL facing the same feed can be cleared.

You can also use feeds to submit for sitemaps. Add a Link tag which will be easier for Google to crawl your feeds.

Using these feeds will make us notified and crawled by seach engines often.

Mark

SEO Tags : Feeds, Tips on using feeds, Feedfetcher, Sitemaps

Last week, Alexa has enhanced their Traffic Report with finer geographic details. Now we can find out the percentage (%) of the traffic from various geographic locations.

Also Alexa provides the break up of the rank of the site in different countries.

Along with the above data and with a few more tweaks, Alexa Traffic Report is much better than it was earlier.

DSarathy.

SEO Tags : Alexa, Alexa Traffic Report, Traffic Ranking